


Hands

by tuna_cowbell



Category: The Centricide (Webseries)
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, Gen, Hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:15:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26004031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuna_cowbell/pseuds/tuna_cowbell
Summary: Authcom has dirt under his nails.Ancom has nails bitten down to the point of bleeding, cuticles ripped, nail polish chipping.Ancap gets manicures twice a month.Authcap has steady hands.Describing the extremists' hands.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 54





	Hands

Authoritarian Communist:

Authcom has dirt under his nails. You don’t need to take his word for it, though he’ll tell you anyway—he works as hard as he believes everyone else should. Knuckles like a mountain range, calluses covering his palms like roaming hills. These hands have built so much, believed in so much.   
He has blood on his hands. Nobody else knows about the dreams, the times he wakes up in the gap between night and morning and swears he can feel it still spilling through his fingers, too much blame to carry. Red blood. Not his, personally, but ideologically. There are some wounds you can’t tourniquet, some messes you can’t sop up with the pages of theory you read.  
At these times, the communist turns the light on and stares st his hands until he believes that they’re clean again. No—never believes that. Only believes in the dirt under his nails, the calluses on his palms, the ability he has to build something better. Something that will make all of the last worth it—  
it has to. 

Anarchist Communist:

Ancom has nails bitten down to the point of bleeding, cuticles ripped, nail polish chipping. They’re the hands of someone used to clawing, scrapping for a hold on a cliff’s edge. Qui know how to keep a solid grip, holding a baseball bat the way qui hold quir breath sometimes, waiting for the next move to be made, the next fight for survival to start. Qui know how to make a fist, flip the bird, hold a megaphone. When holding hands with others at protests, quir grip is so tight, waiting for the moment that this comfort, this solidarity and strength, is ripped from quem. It always happens, it’s only a matter of when.   
(When qui become post-left, one of the first things qui do is take off the green nail polish; Anarkitty has been declawed.)

Anarchist Capitalist:

Ancap gets manicures twice a month. It’s important to keep up appearances, you know. He’s a man of perfected facades and he knows it. He looks so pristine, flipping through the bills in his wallet, or his collection of business cards. Pick a card, any card! He’s a magician, turning thin air into thick stacks of cash. Snapping his fingers and conjuring luxury. He’d like you to believe that there’s nothing he can’t control.   
When he shakes hands his grip is firm, tense as the bear-trap smile he wears. He pulls on the other person, like they’re a rung on the ladder he needs to climb. He pulls them in, like riptide.   
That’s the tell, though he tries to smooth it down—it’s the ragged, hair-trigger energy he and Ancom share. The knowledge of how to fight, in this case how to clamber and clash and conquer, to make it to the top. Ancap lets go of the other’s hand, smooths his suit jacket down, and gestures for a cab. There is always somewhere higher to fight to. 

Authoritarian Capitalsim:

Authcap has steady hands.  
Posed straight when at his sides, keeping straight when saluting the air, aiming straight when firing a gun. Fitting perfect to design, you’d swear you’d find a barcode on him somewhere, a serial number still stamped from when they let him out of the factory. He does not fidget. He does not falter. Who said that Ancap was the only one who knew how to perform?  
The nazi salute cuts the air like a shark fin; too many are scared off, so he’s teaching himself how to bend. He tries to be friendly: puts on a good face, uses the right euphemisms. But when he talks, with that smile thin as a white lie and those eyes shining like wet concrete, the hands at his side are balled into fists.   
Nobody’s confused—it’s clear he’s jaded, jagged. His hands have known torches, known weapons, known the tear of human flesh. Well, he could argue with you about what it means to be human. All the while posing like a machine, hands waiting for instruction. An order to enact, an entity to destroy.


End file.
